I think it is all about future and whether Intel will be able to adequately respond to new challenges in order to avoid the fate of Nokia or Kodak.
It's ironic, Kodak invented the Kodak moment but in the end the real Kodak moment was not the positive kind of thing they envisioned when they coined that term in their marketing.
Which means they need to compete on design for the first time in decades and I have plenty of doubts they can do so.
Yes, there are still gains from getting more transistors for your buck, but you still have to put those transistors to work, and Intel hasn't been a slouch here. The process improvements didn't give them their advantage over AMD.
P4 Willamette was 42M transisters December 2000, i7 2600k from January 2011 (almost exactly 10 years) is arguably the peak of their Core dominance as progress dropped to a standstill over the last 7 years had 8 MiB of cache. That's 4 cores for 1.16 billion transistors or 290 Million each.
After 1Ghz it's really just a latency game, faster ram does not do much so CPU's without massive caches just starve. Which is why the P4 eventually moved to 130 Million transistors and a relatively large cache.